FORWARD

by Andrew Yang

C-SPAN seems stuck in a time capsule from a kinder, gentler era. Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard legal scholar, writes of a time when Americans all watched the same thing on broadcast television and it brought us together. Throughout the 1970s, networks would compete for sixty to seventy million viewers on any given night; that’s more than the number of Americans who watch the Super Bowl today when adjusted for population. Every night was Super Bowl Sunday. The scholars Benjamin Page and Robert Shapiro called this period the “rational public” era, which stretched from about 1940 to 1990, when public attitudes were driven by relatively uniform information. Not everyone agreed, but everyone had a basic agreement on what the news was. It was presented as an objective reality—like a congressional hearing with a minimum of commentary.